Introduction to Ryan

Kevin has been trying to get me to write on this blog for a while so here I am Kevin you can stop whining.

So here’s an introduction to me and the type of stuff I’ll write on. I’m in my first year at Liberty and I’m studying Philosophy, as the side bar says. Being in my first year, I’m not the brightest cookie in the tool shed and whatever I talk about will not be so advanced into the arguments for the existence or non-existence of God but I hope to provoke thought.

I think and reflect on a lot of different things. It’s been a pattern of mine for a very long time and out of that has grown a passion for validating Christianity through intellect. Intellect alone can’t save anyone of course, but I find it increasingly more important to have an intellectual understanding about what one believes. I think that all people ought to involve systematic skepticism into their beliefs, especially Christians. I mean that we should reflect on what we consider to be truths of Christianity and consider their truth against reality. This doesn’t mean that we should be trying to disprove ourselves, but rather we should really consider why we believe what we believe. If people are to be won over we must not assert what we believe to be truth so harshly without reflecting on what it is that we believe first. If we believe someone who claimed to be God was in fact God and did in fact raise from the dead, we better be able to defend that adequately because that is quite a hefty claim to make. If we grant to others that we don’t have all the answers, then more people would likely be won over. We may not be able to answer every question but we ought to have a logically rational basis for believing something and I believe this basis exists.

Also, it is important to note that God cannot be proven with absolute certainty in a philosophical sense. For example, I was on Facebook and saw that someone on my news feed became a fan of atheism. I clicked on it to see what was said on the wall of this group. The most recent post began with, “I am an atheist because of deductive problems with God.” Well of course he has deductive problems with God! If something is deduced, it essentially means that it is absolutely certain, assuming that is both valid and sound. We can’t deduce that God exists anymore than we can deduce that God doesn’t exist or even the other person in the room with us exists. The best we have on any of these is induction. With induction we can only argue for what is probably true, not absolutely certain. However, induction is still a powerful tool and that is where I begin…

-Ryan Jones